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We were racing the fading daylight as I danced along an alarmingly narrow ledge, no wider than a school ruler. I had left Mike Chambers, our ropes expert, to finish rigging the rappel in order to notify the team that they needed to don their harnesses and prepare to rappel off the cliff band that had become a major impediment to our progress that afternoon.

July 1917: Much of Europe is gripped by the unprecedented carnage of the First World War, yet far away, in a forgotten corner of the Ottoman Empire, a different kind of battle is being fought between the German-backed Turks and the Allies, led by the British Expeditionary Force.

For more than a decade, I have been drawn to Antarctica and its icy waters—the extraordinary wildlife that inhabits such a seemingly inhospitable environment, the powerful geophysical confluence of rock and ice, and the formidable physical challenges presented by the wind and currents.

Acclaimed by the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s greatest living explorer,” Sir Ranulph Fiennes has undertaken numerous ground-breaking exploits, including the epic Transglobe Expedition, in which he became the first person to visit both north and south poles by surface means.

Iceland’s best-known Arctic photographer Ragnar Axelsson, or “Rax” as he is universally known, has spent three decades following in the footsteps of the great Arctic explorers to document the vanishing lifeways and landscapes of the far north.

Kate Harris is a writer and adventurer who lives off-grid in Atlin, British Columbia. Named one of Canada’s top modern-day explorers, her journeys edging the limits of nations, endurance, and sanity have taken her to all seven continents, often by bike or ski.